Tech industry

Tech industry

Judge Mehta acknowledged the rapid changes to the Google's business when he issued his remedies in September, writing that the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) had changed the course of the case. He refused to grant government lawyers their request for a Google breakup that would include a spin-off of Chrome, the world's most popular browser. Instead, he pushed less rigorous remedies, including a requirement that Google share certain data with "qualified competitors" as deemed by the court.

The firm's analysis of traffic metrics from 2,756 news sites around the world, 797 in the US, shows a painfully steep drop in Google search traffic over the last year: 33% worldwide and 38% in the US. Much of that drop, especially outside the US, happened after Google began rolling out AI Overview search results that provide a software-generated, multi-paragraph answer, in which you often have to click additional times to see links to the sources Google drew on for that reply.

Uber has built HiveSync, a sharded batch replication system that keeps Hive and HDFS data synchronized across multiple regions, handling millions of Hive events daily. HiveSync ensures cross-region data consistency, enables Uber's disaster recovery strategy, and eliminates inefficiency caused by the secondary region sitting idle, which previously incurred hardware costs equal to the primary, while still maintaining high availability. Built initially on the open-source Airbnb ReAir project, HiveSync has been extended with sharding, DAG-based orchestration, and a separation of control and data planes.

The chatbot owner said that in the next few weeks, it will begin "testing ads" for the free and low-cost subscription "Go" versions of ChatGPT in the United States for logged-in, adult users. Users can expect ads "at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there's a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation." OpenAI said ads will be "clearly labeled" and won't be included under "sensitive or regulated topics," including "health, mental health or politics."

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was reportedly down for tens of thousands of users worldwide on Friday, according to a site that keeps track of online outages. Over 41,000 issues were reported with the controversial microblogging site in the United States alone, with another 8,000 in the United Kingdom and 2,400 in India, according to DownDetector.

The Royal Navy said on Friday that they have launched a new full size crewless helicopter which is designed to track submarines and will undertake missions in the North Atlantic. Since Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war in Ukraine the defence industry has been remodelled as most European government's have increased military spending. The helicopter named "Proteus" has completed a test flight and was part of a £60 million programme,

Digg, one of the original Web 2.0 social news darlings, is back from the dead, and this time it is explicitly gunning for Reddit's crown as the "Front Page of the Internet." Under the renewed leadership of founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the resurrected Digg pitches itself as a community‑driven, AI‑assisted, low‑toxicity social news alternative. To understand this reboot, it helps to consider just how far Digg fell.

Alphabet has the most complete artificial intelligence (AI) tech stack of any company, which positions it to be an AI leader for many years to come. The company has developed one of the world's foremost large language models (LLMs) with Gemini, which it incorporated throughout its products, including Google Search, to both make them better and help drive revenue growth.

To its credit (literally), Verizon has said it will contact customers and provide them with a $20 credit for the inconvenience. Posting on X, the mobile company wrote on Thursday: "Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app."

According to Phillip Torrone, managing director of Adafruit, writing in a YCombinator forum, "This happened after I sent an email reporting the founder, Nate [Seidle], for multiple harassing actions directed at [ Adafruit founder Limor Fried], including behavior by him and a former employee. Instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from Teensy." Torrone and Fried are married.

Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that "removing child exploitation is priority #1." It was certainly a noble goal-social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and "consensually produced adult content" to their feeds without consequence.

While the holiday season typically drives stronger demand, the surge in late 2025 was further amplified by emerging memory shortages that led buyers and brands to secure inventory ahead of anticipated price increases in 2026,

On Tuesday, Microsoft promised to take the "steps needed to be a good neighbor in the communities where we build, own, and operate our data centers." That includes, according to the company, its plans to "pay its own way" to ensure that local electricity bills don't go through the roof in the places where it builds. Specifically, the company says it will work with local utility companies to ensure that the rates it pays cover its full share of its burden on the local grid.

Memory makers just can't churn out their DRAM fast enough. On the heels of an AI-driven shortage, SK Hynix on Tuesday announced a new 19 trillion Korean won (about $13 billion) advanced packaging and test facility in South Korea that could offer some relief - just not for consumer products like laptops and phones. The South Korean memory giant unveiled the new site, dubbed P&T7, which will be located at the Cheongju Technopolis Industrial Park in Chungbuk, South Korea.

ChatGPT's release over three years ago triggered an AI frenzy. While AI models continue to become more capable, to truly be as helpful as possible to people in their everyday lives, they need to have access to everyday tasks. That's only possible by allowing them to live outside a chatbot on your laptop screen and more presently in your environment.

Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it's also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099. "We held off on it for as long as we could, but we had to update our Framework Desktop pricing today to account for the massive increase in LPDDR5x pricing from our suppliers," Framework says in a post on X.